Raven's Camera Quilt - A Blogger's Quilt Festival Entry

It's the Blogger's Quilt Festival week! Each quilter can enter two quilts in the festival and it's so fun browsing through all the entries. There are so many talented quilters. I wanted to be a part of all the excitement.

My favorite finish so far this year is Raven's Camera Quilt. Raven is a professional photographer and my niece. Her mom commissioned this quilt to give her for her birthday.

You can see more pictures and read all about the creation of this quilt here.

Please visit the Blogger's Quilt Festival and be inspired by all the wonderful entries. Amy does a fantastic job every year hosting this event.

Machine Quilted Text: A Finished Mini Quilt

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I was really excited to try out adding text to my quilt by way of Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot. Adding text to your quilt is one of the last things Jacquie teaches in her class.

I decided to test my skill with a mini quilt. Naturally, I chose the word "create". I chose a simple font (Jacquie says a simple font is important for this technique) from my word processing software and increased the font size. I printed it on card stock so that it would be easier to work with and hold up long enough for me to complete marking the letters on my quilt top.

I applied a little bit of glue stick to the back of each letter to keep it still while I was marking around it. I used a blue water soluble pen to trace around each letter.

Then I started matchstick quilting around each letter. The blue tape is a registration line so that my quilting lines don't start leaning to the left or right. I always have a straight line point of reference.

And here are the first three letters all quilted and pretty. Then I saw the word "ate" and had to stop and get a snack. Ha.

All finished!! Let's go over the size of this project. The blue background was cut 8 1/2 inches x 14 1/2 inches. The border is 4 inch strips. The top and bottom are 4 inches x 14 1/2 inches. The side strips are 4 inches x 15 1/2 inches. After quilting and squaring up, this project finishes at 21 inches x 15 inches. The letters are 2 inches tall.

Here's how it looks from the back. For the border, I simply followed the grid design on the fabric.

If I had it to do all over again, there are a few things I would do differently.

• Use bigger letters! These letters are two inches tall. That is tiny when it comes to quilting around them. I am happy with the result but it was tricky quilting inside the "e" and "a".
• I would practice starts and stops. I used the technique of setting my stitch length to zero, stitching a few stitches, then setting it to the quilting stitch length. While this worked, there are spots that look a little knotty. 
• I wanted a thread that contrasted with the background, and this one does, but I think I will try a darker than background thread next time. That is more of a personal preference.

This mini quilt will hang right beside my sewing machine to remind me to always be creative. I have really enjoyed the Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot class and know the techniques I learned there will show up over and over again in my quilting. If you are looking for a machine quilting class, you should consider this one.

Linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday at She Can Quilt, Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story, and Work in Progress Wednesday at Freshly Pieced. Also linking up to Whoop Whoop at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finish It Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts.